Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Members and power

Well, it's obvious that agriculture in the USA is failcascading and soon there will be starvation.

I mean, it's "obvious" if we consider the common in-game thinking that losing members is terrible, while losing land, ships and battles is "content". You probably know the truth that the agriculture in the USA is fine, the worker decrease comes from efficiency increase: more land can be handled by a single farmer. Year by year farmers who can't compete with others leave the sector and join services sector. The 2013 pilot killboard analysis shows something similar: very few pilots, mere 7K out of the 520K total are responsible for half of the kills. The rest are like the uncompetitive farmers. They linger on for some time before they join the carebear sector.

A group shall be evaluated based on their results (kills, land owned ...) and not on their numbers. Hiring warm bodies isn't that hard, BRAVE excels in that, however it didn't help them much in Catch. Nor it helps them in Fountain. In both cases numberically seriously inferior groups (PL and BL) stomp on them. Or think how CFC alliances recruited most of the renters. Do you think they will learn to PvP overnight just because their alliance tag changed? Then how would this number increase translate into performance increase? (by increased ratting performance)

Why did I write this? Because of daydreaming Goons keep telling "MoA is much smaller than us, they can't win". Well, if you follow the monthly CFC loss reports, you know better.

14 comments:

The point is, and this is what is so terribly frustrating.. you are framing the entire narrative around what you think is a measure of performance, and you are ignoring actual measures.

Lets go way way back to the beginning, when you first started Grr. You said you wanted to destroy goons. Your stated goal was removal of them from the game.

Now, you eventually moderated this position, stating that to do so isn't the only victory condition, and that REDUCING THEIR MEMBER BASE and forcing them into a reduced or non sov holding position was your aim.

Now you are saying simply beating them in battles is enough? What if they can continue to take these losses with no impact on their ability to influence the game? Surely victory can only be achieved by depriving them of income and sov, and you can only really do that by depriving them of members?

How many people turn up to fleet ops, and how many people are active in the alliance are metrics that matter to a group. If you have 1000 members you have more capacity to do more than if you have 100 members.

All we want to do is see the numbers. If you are right (and there is no reason to doubt that you are right) then there should be a direct correlation between the number of victories attributed to your scheme and the decrease in the ability for goons to make war.

Failure to provide these kinds of numbers would suggest that you are trying to hide something.

Having lots of members is neither ability to keep Sov, nor having income. The NPC corps have much more members than the whole CFC with no income or power.

The point is that if the successful members (like multibox ratters and super pilots) quit, the total numbers won't diminish, but they'll be BRAVE 2: a farming material, living at Sov only at someone's mercy.

"Why did I write this? Because of daydreaming Goons keep telling "MoA is much smaller than us, they can't win". Well, if you follow the monthly CFC loss reports, you know better."

Then your story should have been about how a small group of mercenaries took over an entire nation, rather than how technology reduces the workforce required. Unless you are suggesting that MoA have new technology unavailable to goons, and therefore can achieve the same firepower with fewer ships.

Not too long ago, when you funded Marmite, people would repeatedly point out that they only helped cull the stupid from the pack. And you always answered that reducing the number of pilots in CFC was the main goal.

Now that people are correctly pointing out that number of members in CFC is in fact, and has been since before your project started, still rising, you start claiming that removing successful members is what matters.

Since those killed to wardecs in highsec are by definition not successful members of CFC, does this mean that all the money you gave to Marmite and other highsec wardeccers was a complete waste?

@Warden of the North: that legion of people suck and want to blame their failure on something out of their control: "we were blobbed". Strange, MoA is blobbed more.

@Zaxin: The technology is available to everyone (both in EVE and in real life). Goons and third world people are simply unskilled to use it and limited to menial labor (F1-pushing).

@Babar: Disagree. "Successful" is measured in ratting taxes and paplinks in the CFC. Just because he is a retard who lost all his possessions in a freighter in Uedama, he is(was) still able to rat and show up in fleets in his only remaining SRP-ed ship. The foundation of CFC is the idea that even a complete retard can be successful if he can rat and press F1 in fleets.

Since rat kills decreased and CFC doesn't go into fights anymore unless forced (abandoning regions instead), we can conclude that activity decreased a lot. The CFC pilot count doesn't reflect that because the (almost) inactive member isn't kicked.

Actually yes. You have not shown a single piece of evidence that your activity is slowing, stopping, depleting, defeating or otherwise impacting goons. We know this because we look at the game now, and we look at it 2 years ago, and goons are just as influential today as they were then. All your numbers prove is that goons can *sustain* the loss of 3T a month perpetually, and that their only sov losses have been calculated moves that every single entity has taken due to changes in game mechanics.

Thats it.

You have no evidence that your project is working - or if you do you refuse to show it. If you are genuinely impacting the purses of the individual line goon as you say you are, then one would expect to see individual line goons doing the following:

1) Leaving2) No longer turning up for CTAs

If you are not seeing a trend in either or both of these then the impact of the line goon and their ratting/hauling/trading alts is not having a net impact on goon activity. Sure there will be some individuals who you are hurting, and that's great..but in aggregate, you need to show that you are having an impact. and you either can't or you wont... and this is confusing to me.

You then trot out a completely irrelevant graph, build yourself a neat little straw man, defeat said straw man, puff out your chest and declare victory...

Be honest, can you see how people might think that you are not being completely honest here?

thats not true. ratting in CFC gets you a bad measuerement. It is measured against your PvP participation and if you only keep ratting, you will have trouble...

also the CFC is not blobbing MOA? How can they? You cant blob guerilla warfare.

CFC abandoning regions was very smart move. you should learn about fozziesov first. all other powerblocs failcascade and cfc is growing in power. so where are they failing?ofcourse activity also decreased a lot after the wars, cause the content is missing. the strengths of the cfc is, that all their memberes are there if a war appears to happen. then you see again 1000+ in fleets. also the play different games now in the meanwhile. really they are loosing eve...

Ok now your really stretching it Gevlon.... Now your claiming that CFC chooses to abandon region instead of fight? Is that really what your claiming now? Just because they are consolidating their forces closer to each other you instead claim it's because they would rather abandon regions than fight. Even after they sold Delve/Querious to N3, they then deploy down to wipe out N3 out of Delve/Querious, quite succesfully I might add. You've been moving your goal posts the past couple years and all that money you spent to claim killmails as your own has accomplished absolutely nothing. Give us one example of an accompishment your money has paid for? CFC is bigger than it ever was so it isn't losing members as you had hoped. Any small pirate group can get kills in fatc a solo roamer through CFC space can get kills easily, especially when the CFC is loaded with new bros.

Individual line Goons don't show up, so CFC choose to abandon regions knowing they can't defend it. Yes, it was better to just run than being beaten up. But they are still running. Not really the sign of "stronger than ever". They were clearly stronger when they had Fountain, Querious, Delve and PB.

Individual line Goon logs in less to rat, shown by decreasing ratting numbers.

"But CFC defeated N3, so they are winning" is like "I ganked lots of miners, so I'm winning". N3 suck. Defeating them makes no one winner, just better than them. Yes, they could kick those failures out of Delve. No, they had no hope to hold it against Pizza (who blued them only against N3, wouldn't play nice with Goon ratters).

That's... not why they abandoned their regions, and you know it. They abandoned their regions because of changes to Sov mechanics, which meant it made in game sense to consolidate. As a fan of min/maxing, I would have thought you would appreciate such a thing.

> Not really the sign of "stronger than ever". They were clearly stronger when they had Fountain, Querious, Delve and PB.

Under old sov they were, under new sov they wouldn't be. They are stronger consolidating. That's part of the point of fozziesov. And to claim that somehow this is because individual line goons weren't turning up is intellectually dishonest. You have shown no proof that line goons are not showing up - that's precisely the information I'd like to see from you. Correlation between your activity and goons showing up to fight. You can't say on the one hand that they aren't showing up therefore they are dropping sov, and on the other hand claim that them not show your evidence.

> "But CFC defeated N3, so they are winning" is like "I ganked lots of miners, so I'm winning". N3 suck.

Maybe - but goons showing a history of beating every major sov holding entity the game has thrown at them in the past decade shows that goons are winning. You are cherry picking data points and ignoring the long term trend here.

@Gevlon"@Zaxin: The technology is available to everyone (both in EVE and in real life). Goons and third world people are simply unskilled to use it and limited to menial labor (F1-pushing)."

Your graph shows a decrease in employment in US agriculture.The decrease is due to the invention of technology in the 1950s which allowed for intensive agriculture to produce more food per hectare, and mechanisation which allowed for fewer people to work the same land.

Your claim is that the same thing is what causes MoA to be superior to goons.

Third world individuals are not too unskilled to drive a combine harvester, nor are they incapable of putting fertilizer and pesticide by the truckload on their crops.The price of a combine harvester in Africa is somewhat different than the price of a combine harvester in the USA, as well as the mechanisms behind getting one.

So, either goons lack the financial resources to purchase technology (definitely not true), or they are not yet at the stage where they have the knowledge (Pre-1950s USA), and, seeing as they are more than capable of doing other highly technical calculations within Eve, it is a stretch to say that they lack the knowledge and tools to make proper fleets.

I do however, like your assertion that farmers in the third world are not efficient because they lack skills.